Bluesky is #1 in the U.S. App Store. Is this a first for open source?

Bluesky is growing at around 10 accounts/second as of an hour ago.

This has put their iOS app [0] in the top position under free apps, [1] in the USA and UK App Stores. The app is MIT licensed open source.

Others and myself are wondering, is their #1 position in the iOS free app category a first for an open source app? (please note that this is all apps, not just social media)

[0] https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app

[1] https://imgur.com/gallery/gHuwrrw

I'm generally positive about BlueSky and pleased for their current successes.

But I fell like the really hard part is yet to come, and being open might make that part harder.

All online communities go through the same phases (or die along the way).

In the beginning it's populated by enthusiasts, tech adopters, people with good intentions. The problems are mostly technical and infrastructure.

Then it grows rapidly with mostly the same parameters.

Then it gets big enough so the trolls, spammers, bots, misogynist, racists, marketers, advertisers et al arrive. At this point the problems become social - moderation etc.

Failure to manage this stage well leads to, well, Twitter.

And it's by far the hardest part of the whole process. I hope BlueSky get this part right.

Stretching the definition of “open source” here

For anyone curious about the new growth of Bluesky and the decline of Twitter (x), the youtuber D'Angelo Wallace did a video exploring what the new user experience on Twitter (x) is like as of a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzwVqKtLBGc

If the algorithms for sorting and filtering and discovering aren't open source, a social app is not open. It really is that simple. Some open source artifact on your device wrapping proprietary code on a server is not in the category of "open source products" because the only parts that matter are entirely closed. "My HTML front end is licensed MIT" does not make your product which is entirely dependent on secret sauce in your back end open source. Enough with the bullshit. Labels matter and if the current generation on this site doesn't understand something as fundamental as open vs proprietary, we're all screwed.

I was never a big user of Twitter, but I joined a Mastodon server around 2020. I am still using it regularly, but I honestly find it pretty hard to get useful content: it feels like either it's random stuff I don't care about, or always the same people I follow and don't bring me much.

At first I didn't want to try Bluesky (because of some of the founders, I suppose? I don't know, Mastodon seemed more organic), but I eventually did. And I actually like their system of "custom" algos. I have a few very interesting feeds now (international news, national news, ...).

So yeah, positively surprised by Bluesky.

Watched Theo research and talk about Bluesky yesterday while he prepped for a video. Was pretty cool to learn the history and the mission of the company.

It's way more important than just a social app. Happy to join and support it.

Love that its OSS and so easy to build locally.

Is only frontend open-source or backend sources are also open? For example Telegram is fully open-source at frontend, but not backend

Maybe. Open source iOS apps are very rare, let alone popular ones.